Amazon Sponsored Products Update

With a subtle language change in the Amazon Ads UI earlier this week, Amazon quietly set the stage to introduce new functionality for Sponsored Products ads in both Seller Central and AMS - finally allowing advertisers to target ads by ASIN or Product Category, in addition to existing keyword targeting.

Named “Product Targeting”, this new beta feature appears to be available only to certain accounts at this time - although we expect Amazon to roll this out to all accounts very soon.

In addition to targeting individual products, you’re now able to target product categories. This introduces very similar capabilities to Amazon’s Product Display Ad that is currently only available to Vendors, and begs the question; is Amazon planning to deprecate PDAs and instead designate that inventory to other ad placements like Sponsored Brands and DSP?

Either way, we’re currently running tests for our clients to see where Product Targeted ads appear, and what the early performance is. We will update this post when we have more information. Our understanding is that this update will allow you to target the carousel “Sponsored Products Related to this Item” on a detail page directly, giving brands more control over when they might be eligible for this placement, and how much they’re willing to pay for it:

Search Term Reports have always shown when your product appears here, by displaying an ASIN in the keyword field. Previously, there wasn’t much an advertiser could do with this data, as you could never directly target this placement. Advertisers can now take lists of these converting ASINs from their search term report, and add it to a Sponsored Products campaign to directly target ASINs where they have great performance:

“Using the search term report to find converting ASINs on your products over the last 60-days is the best way to utilize this new targeting feature” - Ryan Burgess, Director of Amazon.

Negative Product Targeting

In addition to targeting specific ASINs that convert well for your ads, you can negatively target ASINs that perform poorly. This can help save brands money as they won’t be paying for clicks on ASINs that don’t convert or are highly irrelevant for their products.

Conclusion

If you’re running Sponsored Products Ads on Amazon (and if you sell on Amazon, you should be running these ads) we recommend adding Product & Category level targeting to your overall strategy as soon as possible. Using the search term report to find and target converting ASINs will help you stand out from the competition as we enter the busy Q4 buying season on Amazon. If you're looking to dive in more, check out our complete guide to Search Term Isolation.

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